


A Week in the Country

by chainsaw_poet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Adventure, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Plotty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-13
Updated: 2011-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-14 17:47:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/151849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainsaw_poet/pseuds/chainsaw_poet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's lifestyle has taken its toll on his health and John is worried. With Mycroft's help, John coerces Sherlock into taking a holiday in the country to get some rest. Unfortunately, their trip doesn't quite turn out to be a relaxing as John had planned, when Sherlock's latest case decides to catch up with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for the sherlockbbc_fic meme on Livejournal. All places mentioned are real, although the topography between them has occasionally been altered for reasons of narrative.

John had got used to coming into the living room to find Sherlock curled up on the sofa in the same clothes that he’d been wearing when he had distractedly said goodnight to John some seven hours previously. He got used to scraping into the rubbish bin untouched portions of takeaway curry, cheese on toast, baked potato with tuna. He got used to going to meet an old friend, or to work at the surgery, or to bed and knowing that Sherlock was out pacing the streets of London, with or without Lestrade, trying to fit together all the pieces of the latest puzzle. But the sickening worries that settled in his stomach and refused to leave – those were harder to get used to. Sherlock’s habits were, according to every possible connotation of the word, unhealthy.

Eventually, these patterns of behaviour began to leave compelling evidence on Sherlock’s body. His skin, always skirting on the edges of translucency, took on a greyish hue, and the circles of smudged charcoal beneath his eyes became a permanent feature. He seemed to feel the cold more intensely. Whenever they met Lestrade outside, standing over yet another body, John noticed that Sherlock drew his coat tightly around himself even though spring was coming, and the gas fire danced in the faux-hearth of 221b with mocking gaiety, even on balmy evenings. A slight tremor, undetectable to anyone who did not know the man well, had infected Sherlock’s long, slim hands.

The sense of things not being as they should be had crept up on John. It stalked about in the dark and vacant spaces of his friendship with Sherlock: the places that were the equivalent of the space beneath the fridge and the floor that no-one bothers to clean, or the shadowy gap between streetlights where it’s impossible to feel quite safe. The places in their friendship that neither of them wanted to explore. It was a niggling, festering problem – too small to merit a proper discussion, but too large to be idly brought up on the course of another free dinner at which Sherlock didn’t eat a thing. Not that John hadn’t tried.

“Are you sure you’re quite well?”

“Quite.” Quite sure, or quite well?, John thought. It didn’t matter. Either implied answer was a lie.

He knew he wasn’t the only one who had noticed either. Mycroft’s calls were becoming more frequent. Sherlock had taken to retreating to his room whenever he was forced to answer them, so that John could only experience the conversation as a series of angry responses from his flatmate, muffled by the thin walls and the already-slammed door. It was still a surprise, however, when John felt his own phone vibrate in his pocket and retrieved it, only to find the name Mycroft Holmes appearing on the screen above jaunty picture of a telephone that denoted an incoming call.

“Is my brother sitting opposite you?” There was nothing as unnecessary as a greeting to begin the conversation.

“No. He’s using the ten leading brands of cigarette to create burn marks on the arm of a corpse. I’m making the tea.” John could almost hear Mycroft gritting his teeth.

“Good. How would you describe the state of his health?”

“Sherlock says that he’s fine.”

“So you’ve had a conversation about it, which means you’re worried.” John silently cursed the verbal slip – _or maybe I meant him to know that?_ – as Mycroft continued. “Yes, he says he’s fine. But you’re a doctor, what do you think?”

“Confidentiality. Something I’m sure you know about in your line of work.”

“You’re a doctor, you’re not his doctor.” It was probably the closest that John Watson had heard, or would ever hear, to a note of frustration in the voice of Mycroft Holmes.

“If you want to talk about Sherlock’s health, you’ll have to talk to Sherlock.” The line went dead.

Lestrade, too, must have noticed the change in his consulting detective, because each time he called at Baker Street with a new case, he wore a guiltier expression. Weeks ago, he’d stopped looking John in the eye when he greeted them, knowing the icy glare that would be awaiting him if he did. And each time that Sherlock explained who the culprit was – as precisely and accurately as ever, but perhaps a little slower, as if the words wouldn't come to his mind with such ease - and Lestrade sent his team off to apprehend them, the DI promised that this would be the last one for a while, that he’d let Sherlock have a break, that he could see that he needed one. (Sherlock would scowl and sulk at this last accusation.) Of course, that was never the case. But John couldn’t blame Lestrade. The man must have been under untold pressure to get these complicated, grisly cases solved as soon as possible, and with the minimum amount of blood spilt. Besides, if he hadn’t come to Sherlock, Sherlock would have only gone to him asking why not. And whilst Sherlock was insisting he was fine, and there was nothing tangible, nothing specific wrong with him. John couldn’t do anything about it.

This was why, awful as it made him feel, John experienced an overwhelming sense of relief when Sherlock’s immune system finally succumbed to the enormous strain under which he had been placing it. It was just an ordinary cold; blocked nose, sore throat, slight temperature. Had it been any other patient – John couldn’t, hard as he tried, stop thinking of Sherlock as his patient – John would have tossed them some paracetamol and told them to get on with it. But now there was something wrong that Sherlock couldn’t effectively deny, and John had a reason to intercept Lestrade on the stairs outside their flat.

“He can’t come with you today. He’s ill.”

“Just half an hour? If he looks at the crime scene, I know he’ll see it straightaway. It’s just something I can’t quite put my finger…”

“No.” Lestrade almost looked grateful for John’s stubbornness.

“You’re the doctor, I suppose. How ill is he?” The way in which Lestrade asks this makes John realise that it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility, wouldn’t be unexpected even, for there to be something really, badly wrong.

“Nothing serious. Just a cold. He’ll probably be right as rain in a few days. I’ll call you when he's feeling better.”

“Thank you.” Lestrade was a good man; he knew when to do as he was asked. As he went back into the flat, John saw Sherlock standing at the window and watching Lestrade climb back into the unmarked car of the Metropolitan Police. As the car pulled away from Baker Street, Sherlock draped himself over the sofa, turning away from John and burying his head in the cushions. Let him sulk, John thought, I don’t care. I’d rather he was angry at me than harming himself. If he was lying petulantly on the sofa, at least he was resting.

But he didn’t rest. Maybe he couldn’t deal with the boredom that came with relaxation, or maybe he just didn’t want to. Even confined indoors, he would scour the online editions of every newspaper, and text Lestrade with every deduction he made from reading between their lines. Body parts would arrive at the flat, couriered over from St Barts; no amount of e-mails to Molly seemed to stem the flow of severed limbs. Sherlock would seize them as like a starving man might grasp at a loaf of bread, and whisk them into the kitchen, where he would subject them to god-knows-what procedures in the name of science – but mostly in the name of keeping himself occupied. And John was sure that whenever he had to leave the flat - to get the shopping, or pay the bills, or do a locum shift at some surgery or another to keep some money coming in – Sherlock would put on his long coat and slip out too, unnoticed, to chase up some lead or other that he couldn’t get out of his head. John understood that it was difficult to switch off, to relax completely, but he wasn’t even trying. There was too much in London to ignore.

And because he wasn’t even trying to rest, Sherlock wasn’t getting any better. Although he silently, if ungraciously, accepted any medication that John placed in front of him, Sherlock refused to eat more than a few mouthfuls of anything John cooked or ordered, providing his body with little energy to fight the infection. The cold left him with a lingering cough, dry and rasping, that he couldn’t seem to shake. It was worse at night, when he would run a temperature - never high enough to be really worrying, but sometimes high enough to leave him shivery, even in front of the fireplace. Sherlock took to going to bed at night, only wake up in pyjamas damp with sweat. This sudden need for sleep told John that the illness must be more serious than Sherlock was letting on, and the anxious knot in his stomach grew larger.

Three weeks on from the conversation in the stairwell, John still hadn’t called Lestrade to say that Sherlock was well enough to take cases. Ostensibly, he hadn’t called because Sherlock wasn’t well enough to take case, but John should have told him something. Sherlock must have been speaking to Lestrade, and putting the policeman in an impossible position. Not listening to Sherlock meant a very strong possibility that people would die; listening to him only perpetuated the unsustainable, deceit-ridden status quo. John knew that he should call Lestrade, and knew that he wasn’t going to call, because that would mean admitting that no, Sherlock wasn’t any better and yes, he was probably worse. A lot worse.

Now that Sherlock was actually sleeping at night, John would creep into his bedroom and watch him. For five nights in a row, he had gently opened the door, being careful to make as little noise as possible. He would try to diagnose Sherlock from the doorway, never daring to inch closer to the bed, in case he woke up. It was torture. The man would toss and turn feverishly while he tried to force shallow breaths from his lungs. From time to time, his body would be wracked by coughs that sounded like they were tearing strips from his lungs. When this happened, John would slink back into the shadows, sure that Sherlock was about to wake, but he never did, and so John would stand and watch until the murmur of traffic from the street below told him that it was almost daylight.

After the fifth night, John himself was exhausted to the brink of collapse. Curled up on top of a bed that he hadn’t slept in as the dawn broke over London, he was reminded of something that his drill sergeant at Sandhurst had told him. Sometimes, the most heroic thing to do is to call for reinforcements. Hardly aware of his own movements, John realised that his mobile phone was in his hand and that the jaunty picture of the telephone, in the colour that denoted an outgoing call, was dancing above a familiar name. He held the handset to his ear.

“Hello, John Watson.” There was an expectant pause, but John said nothing. What could he say, except… “Rather early for a social call, isn’t it?”

“Mycroft,” John said. His voice sounded distant, somehow disconnected from himself, and wildly, hopelessly uncertain. “Mycroft, I need your help.”


	2. Chapter 2

Having listened to John’s evaluation of the situation at 221b, Mycroft issued him with a clear set of instructions. Once Sherlock was awake, he was to send Mycroft a text message and then leave the flat (“Don’t give him an explanation, just go. If you don’t say anything, he can’t tell whether or not you’re lying to him.”) and to return forty-five minutes later. John had done exactly as he had asked, spending the time in a café on the Edgware Road, anxiously sipping at a watery cup of coffee and staring at the hands of his watch. Inviting Mycroft into the problem had been a last resort, and probably not one upon which John had consciously decided; he was almost more certain of having done something terribly wrong, rather than having done the right thing. Now, turning his key in the latch, he steadied himself for the scene that awaited him.

There was no broken crockery, or smashed furniture, or holes in the wall. An artificial calm was stretched, like a prisoner on the rack, over the two brothers. Mycroft sat in the arm chair that John usually occupied; Sherlock was tucked into a corner of the sofa, knees pulled up tightly to his chest. He was still in his pyjamas, creating a strange contrast with the neatly-pressed, dark-grey suit that his brother wore. Perhaps it was this proximity to an older, muddled reflection of his features, but in the grey light of the morning, Sherlock looked very young. John’s intrusion into the scene was not acknowledged.

“I can’t leave London now,” Sherlock muttered, not looking at either Mycroft or John. “There are two bodies – in a couple of days the pieces will fit together.” The broken phrases sounded strange coming from Sherlock’s mouth. He was normally frighteningly articulate. John could see that his lower lip was trembling and tried not to stare at it.

“In a couple of days, you might have a nervous breakdown,” Mycroft said coolly. “As I said, it’s all been arranged.”

“I don’t care what you’ve arranged; I didn’t ask you to arrange anything,” Sherlock snapped. “If I don’t stay and see the thing out, people could die.”

“I’ll give Lestrade and his team all the assistance they require. No one is going to get hurt.”

“I need to finish this!” Sherlock’s voice cracked as he raised it above a hoarse whisper. “Tell him, John.”

“Tell him what? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John replied, quite honestly. Mycroft turned to John with a look that gave no suggestion that John might have anticipated his presence at the flat.

“As you might have noticed, John, my brother is a little under the weather.” Sherlock threw a particularly murderous look at Mycroft but didn’t say a word. “He needs rest – and I imagine that you, too, could benefit from a holiday. I have, therefore, arranged a little sojourn in the Cotswolds for both of you. I am told that fresh air is quite fortifying, and that nothing very much happens there.” John didn’t have to pretend to look surprised. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting Mycroft to do, but this wasn’t it. But before he could respond, Sherlock was speaking again.

“Rural living doesn’t suit me,” he said darkly.

“Living in London is making you ill,” Mycroft retorted.

“And going to the country will make it worse!” Sherlock had pushed his ruined lungs too far this time, and the horribly-familiar, rasping cough began to rip through his throat. Mycroft looked at his brother impassively as he and John waited, in awkward silence, for the fit to pass. “You don’t understand,” Sherlock continued, as he finally caught his breath. “The boredom – it’ll be intolerable. I can’t be bored.”

“I understand,” Mycroft said, sounding anything but understanding. “We just happen to differ on whether or not a little boredom might be good for you.”

“Boredom isn’t good for me. You know that, Mycroft.”

“I think you should go, Sherlock,” John said quickly, looking his friend directly in the eye and trying to pretend that this was not a loaded conversation, that things were not a breaking point and that Mycroft was somewhere else, anywhere but in the room with them. “I think we should go. I know I can’t make you go. Maybe Mycroft can, I don’t know, but I can’t. But I think it’s a good idea. You’re not getting any better here.”

“I’m not going to be better there. It’s too quiet. I won’t be able to think. I’ll have nothing to think about.”

“That’s the point. It’ll only be for a week or so. Just enough for you to get your strength back.” Sherlock made a derisive noise. “I know you’ll be bored, but… We can do crosswords. I’ll even play you at chess.” John caught the hint of a bitter smile teasing at Sherlock’s lips.

“That’s not going to help; you’re terrible at chess.” He took a deep breath, paused and then shook his head. “No, I can’t. Not now. I’m too close to catching him.” Sherlock’s eyes were worryingly bright. Perhaps the fever had lingered into the morning, or perhaps it was something else that wasn’t so easily explained. “Two days – three days at most – that’s all it will take, and then we can…”

“And then they’ll be another case,” John said. “Something else that you’ll need to finish. There’s always another case.”

“If I don’t finish it, people might die.”

“Mycroft promised he’d take care of that.” John’s eyes flickered over to the other Holmes brother. “Didn’t you?”

“You have my word that everything that can be done, will be done,” Mycroft said. There was a horrible, gaping silence. It seemed to last for whole minutes; the three of them in the room, none of them looking at each other, and John barely daring to move. The Holmes brothers both looked unperturbed, making John wonder whether they were used to such painful absences of conversation. Finally, Sherlock shook his head.

“Only a week,” he said softly, as if every word was a struggle. John exhaled, brimming over with relief.

“Only a week,” he repeated. Mycroft rose from the armchair and straightened his jacket.

“In two hours time a car will be parked outside your flat. The keys for that car will be left outside your front door, and the petrol tank will be full. Inside the car, there will be a satellite navigation device that will direct you to your location. I took the liberty of programming it with the scenic route. I’d advise packing an umbrella and something warm to wear; the weather forecast isn’t good, I’m afraid.” He was already most of the way to the door. “Will you call me when you arrive?”

“No,” Sherlock said. His lip was trembling again. Mycroft smiled wryly.

“I thought not,” he said, and closed the door.


	3. Chapter 3

“Have you ever lived in the country?” Sherlock asked quite suddenly, his voice only just carrying over the quiet murmur of the one o’clock news on Radio Four. John had been driving for almost a two hours, and even the outer suburbs of what could reasonably be called Greater London were far behind them. Now, having left Aylesbury, the Buckinghamshire countryside stretched out on either side of the A-road. It was a mottled and tousled lawn of undulating spring-green, broken only by villages that had the misfortune to be bisected by the coming of the motor car, and towns lying in the distance that they would never visit and whose names they did not know. The sat nav, in its emotionless but strangely soothing monotone, periodically informed them to continue straight ahead and take the second exit at each roundabout.

“I grew up just outside Chelmsford, if that counts,” John replied, with an unnecessary glance at a road-sign. In his peripheral vision, he saw Sherlock shake his head. Sherlock was staring out of the passenger side window, his body curled away from John. He had not removed his coat.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Chelmsford is practically London. And anyway, it’s a town. I meant somewhere really small and even more out of the way. The kind of place that used to have a post office and a school, but now only has a pub, and where there are only two buses a day into town.”

“No, I haven’t lived anywhere like that,” John said, adding with a smile, “But it sounds like you have.” Sherlock made a noise that fell somewhere between disgust and annoyance.

“Fortunately not. Or not for any extended period. My mother and father left London for a hamlet in Surrey whilst I was in my second year of university.” Sherlock related this information in a tone of voice that suggested he took their decision to move house as a personal insult. “I don’t think I ever stayed there for longer than a week at a time.”

“What happened to the house after they…” John let his voice trail off, unwilling to complete the sentence.

“After they both died? I’ve no idea. Mycroft sold it, I expect. I can’t see that he would keep it. He hated it there as much as I did.”

“So it’s not a family house, this place that Mycroft is directing us to?”

“Not as far as I’m aware. We don’t have much family. Mycroft keeps closer track of our few distant cousins than I do – purely for professional reasons, you understand.” John nodded grimly.

“So is this place we’re going to some safe house of Mycroft’s, then? Somewhere he sends people when they need to hide out?”

“Come on, John. You don’t hide people in villages,” Sherlock snapped. "It would take until last orders on the day that you installed your man for everyone in the parish to know what was going on.”

In the background, the newsreader began to forecast rain for the south-west of England.

*

The destination programmed into the sat nav had been a postcode, and John had stopped paying attention to the road-signs when the rolling hills and golden houses of the Cotswolds began to distract him. The landscape, he realized, was oddly familiar, perhaps because it had been so endlessly reproduced on boxes of fudge, jigsaw puzzles and episodes of _Midsummer Murders_. Then suddenly, as they drove through Stow-on-the-Wold, vague memories of a grandparent, or maybe an aunt, taking Harry and him to a tea room there began to creep back into his mind. He wanted to see if he could find the place, and suggested to Sherlock that they stop for lunch, but Sherlock shook his head firmly, so John sighed and drove on. Never mind; they had a week to fill with country walks, National Trust properties and tea rooms. Even Sherlock couldn’t sulk forever.

The sat nav took them through Stow and instructed them to make one final left turn, before politely informing them that their destination would be on the right. John felt his shoulders relax at the prospect of the drive being over, and glanced over to Sherlock to see his body do the exact opposite; he began to cough again. They had moved out of range of the radio signal long ago. John had not bothered to retune it, electing instead to turn off the white-noise, and so the sound of Sherlock struggling to clear the irritation from his lungs was awkwardly loud in the silent car. He caught his breath again just as they approached the limits of the village, at which point John was the one who nearly choked as he saw the signpost.

 _Upper Slaughter – Please take care while driving through our village._

The corners of Sherlock’s mouth tilted up almost imperceptibly; it was closest thing John had seen to him smiling in weeks.

“He’s always had an odd sense of humour,” Sherlock whispered. Between the Holmes brothers, a statement like that was a warm admission of affection. Still somewhat shaken by the macabre nomenclature of their destination, John found himself smiling too.

“It’s not just that,” he said, swinging the car around to the right, as the woman’s voice instructed, and down a narrow lane. “It’s a familiar name. I’ve read about it somewhere – can’t place it though.” Sherlock shrugged his shoulders as though this was of no consequence, and John dropped the subject.

The lane dipped down towards the right and narrowed even more, eventually becoming the driveway of a small cottage, fashioned from Cotswold stone. The natural dusty-yellow hew of the masonry had turned grey and mossy with age, but the building still exuded a warmth in the dullish grey light of early, cloudy spring. John parked the car and turned off the engine. For a moment, they both sat in silence, examining the house. John allowed his eyes to skirt over the sash windows, which looked to be single glazed and with woodwork that was in need of repair, and the heavy front door, made of what looked like oak. There seemed to be a couple of gaps in the slate tiles in the roof, and two bricks were missing from the top of the chimney. The garden could have been described as either romantically natural or rather overgrown, depending on how charitable you were being.

“How long since anyone lived here?” John asked, unbuckling his seat belt. Sherlock’s eyes narrowed.

“Not as long as you might think. Slates probably came loose in those high winds we had back in October; this part of the country was hit badly, I recall. Windows are in need of repair, but they’ve been painted within eighteen months, albeit by someone who isn’t a professional – short of money, hence why they didn’t replace them altogether. And the garden would be far more overgrown if it had been left over spring and summer. I’d say six months. Maybe even less.” Sherlock paused. “I believe I wasn’t supposed to be thinking?”

“You’re not,” John said. “Did Mycroft give you a key to the front…?”

“Under the doormat,” Sherlock interrupted. “Where else do people leave keys?” John couldn’t argue with this.

“Come on,” he said firmly. “Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

It wasn’t much warmer inside the cottage. The heavy front door led into a small hallway, of which a battered coat stand was the only notable feature; neither man decided to use it. Rather than taking the narrow stairs that rose in front of them, John placed their bags at its foot and followed Sherlock through the door on the left which opened into the living room. It seemed to be in the process of being dragged forward in time. Whilst the walls had been given a coat of bright magnolia, the floor was still covered with a migraine-inducing carpet and there was swirled plaster on the ceiling. The main redeeming feature of the room was the open fire which, even in the 1970s, someone was smart enough not to tamper with.

“No central heating,” John said, gesturing towards the fireplace and the storage heater fixed underneath the windowsill. “We’ll have to keep the fire in, I suppose.”

“You were a boy scout,” Sherlock said dryly. John decided not to ask how he knew that. Sherlock had curled himself up on the small sofa, and was pressing buttons on his phone with a rather pained expression on his face. “There’s no wireless network.” John resisted the temptation to roll his eyes.

“There’s no internet at all, I should imagine,” he said. “And do you even get mobile phone signal here?” He pulled his own phone from the pocket and saw that the name of the network had been replaced with a message reading Emergency Calls Only. Sherlock looked up and shook his head. “I should check if the landline is working.” At that very instant, an insistent ring came from the kitchen. John went to answer it, knowing full well the only person who could be on the end of the line.

“Hello, Mycroft.”

“I’m glad you made it there with no mishaps,” the voice at the receiver replied. The line wasn’t good; Mycroft’s voice was muffled by a soft rustling sound.

“Where did you put the…”

“The satellite navigation device. So much easier than tampering with the hire car itself, I thought. I see you brought it inside with you; I can assure you that crime is not a problem in your part of Gloucestershire. I apologize that I was unable to make the place more welcoming for you; the fridge, I regret, is empty.”

“As long as that includes body parts and poisons, I think we’ll manage,” John said stiffly. A heavy silence hung over the line.

“My brother is as well as can be expected?” Mycroft asked, finally.

“As far as I can tell. Do you want to speak to him?” Mycroft cleared his throat, causing the phone to crackle even more vigorously.

“I’ll trust your professional opinion, Doctor Watson. If he becomes particularly tiresome, you know how to get in touch with me.” The crackling sound remained for a fraction of a second, before there was a loud click and the unsettling hum of the line going dead.

“What did Mycroft want?” Sherlock mumbled, as John came back into the living room. His phone, useless as it was, now lay discarded on the floor and he was stretched out awkwardly in the confines of the small sofa. He still hadn’t removed his coat, and he was staring, distracted, at the small television set that stood silently in one corner of the room.

“He asked after you, actually,” John said. Sherlock remained impassive, and John decided that it was not the time to press the importance of the only family that you have left. “And told me there was nothing in the fridge. I’m going to light the fire, and then walk to the newsagents – we drove past it on the way in. Do you want to join me?”

Sherlock shook his head. John had seen this kind of unresponsive stupor from Sherlock before, usually when they had gone more than five days without Lestrade or Dimmock coming up with anything suitably taxing for him. But here, it was different. In London, Sherlock fought against anything that rendered him other than active and alert, or else he embraced these lethargic episodes of darkness. They came with rituals and trappings; the violin, the dressing gown, John’s service revolver. John had never seen depression performed with such exuberance. Here, away from the watching eyes of, well, anyone whose opinion Sherlock deigned to acknowledge, the performance was gone. He looks ill, John thought. He placed a match against a firelighter and, quickly, the new flame curled over the white block and onto the small log that lay on top of it. He looks exhausted.

“Here, let me…” John’s voice trailed off as he manoeuvred Sherlock’s arms out of his coat. As he did so, his hand brushed against the back of Sherlock’s neck, and he couldn’t help but feel the unnatural warmth that was radiating from his skin. Sherlock curled up tighter into the sofa, as John folded the garment over the back of the armchair.

“I’ll be back soon, ok?” he called from the hallway, where the still-unpacked bags still lay. There was no reply. John replaced his jacket and shut the front door behind him, twisting the key in the lock before burying it in his pocket.


	4. Chapter 4

John mentally ran through the items that they needed as he walked along the lane that led back towards the centre of the village. It wasn’t particularly necessary to do so, doubtless he’d remember everything, but it stopped his mind from dwelling on other things. Things that were lying, curled up on the sofa, back in the house. If anything, Sherlock seemed worse now they had arrived. John told himself that this was just because Sherlock was finally allowing himself to uncoil from the spring-loaded state that had become normalcy for both of them. He also took comfort from the fact that Mycroft had been the one who came up with the plan, and Mycroft was not a man who was often wrong.

The sound of a small animal scuttling in the hedgerow startled him out of his thoughts, and reminded him that he was in unfamiliar territory too. Sherlock had been right; this was not Chelmsford. Of course, he’d been away from the city before – the Afghan desert, for a start – but then, the removal had been absolute. He hadn’t expected to see other people, or to hear sirens – and so he didn’t miss them. In a country with no roads, you can’t feel uneasy at the absence of lamp-posts. Here and now, their absence unsettled him. It would be truly dark when the sun went down, not the half-darkness of London at night that he was used to. Then there was the silence; not even in Afghanistan had he been forced to try to sleep through silence.

Distracted by his thoughts, John almost walked into the man who was standing at the bottom of the road. He was examining an ordinance survey map, but was not dressed for a walk. He was wearing a dark woollen coat in a hounds-tooth check, over jeans that looked expensive and a pair of smart, freshly-polished, leather brogues. Mid-fifties, John would have guessed, and if he was from the area, he was one of those escape-to-the-country types who commuted two days a week. John had just excused himself and was about to continue walking, when the man’s voice stopped him.

“Is the church in that direction?” he asked, pointing towards what looked like a village green in the part of the village that John had not yet explored.

“I’m sorry – I’m not from round here,” John began, and then interrupted himself. “No, it must be. I didn’t see it when I drove in from the other end of the village. Can I see your map?” The man handed it over with what looked like a thankful expression. John quickly realised he’d had it upside down, which seemed like a particularly difficult mistake to have made.

“I’m awful with these things,” the man said with an embarrassed laugh, before adding - “You look like you know what you’re doing, though. Do you like walking?”

“No, I was, er…” It wasn’t that he didn’t take pride in having been a soldier, but John had learnt that admitting could lead to awkward silences at best and heated arguments at worst. “I was a boy scout,” he finished quickly. “Here we go, it should be just around that bend and then up a pathway to the left. Look, you can see the spire over the top of that thatched roof.” The man looked over and nodded his head.

“Are you here on holiday then?” John nodded. “With your family?”

“No.” Too many questions, John thought, before he saw the nervous flicker in the man’s eye prompted by his own cold tone, and mentally reprimanded himself You’re in the countryside. People are friendlier. He just wants to chat. John forced himself to smile graciously. “I’m sorry – I’m here with a friend – my flatmate. We’re staying in a cottage just down there.” He pointed back along the lane. “Are you staying in the village too?” The man shook his head.

“I’m in Stow – and I’m leaving tomorrow. I only really came to see the church here.”

“Oh, is it famous for something?” John said, peering over at the spire and thinking that it might be something to distract Sherlock with in three days time when he was about to start tearing apart the walls.

“No, nothing like that. I’m researching family history. My mother grew up in the village, you see. The house she lived in was torn down, but my great uncle was killed at Passchendale and his name is on the war memorial in the church. I wanted to take a look for myself.” There was an awkward silence, as if the man expected John to make a comment on this.

“Well, good luck in finding him,” John said, taking a step backwards.

“Thanks again for the help with the map,” the man replied, turning away from John and walking towards the opposite end of the village. John followed him with his eyes for a moment, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed towards the village shop.

Upon his return to the house, laden down with groceries, a dubious looking bottle of wine and some over-the-counter painkillers that he doubted would make Sherlock feel much better, John found his friend still curled up on the sofa and fast asleep. Images from a forgettable movie of sixty years ago were displayed on the flickering, twitching television screen, the soft murmur of dialogue humming through the room. John felt grateful as he placed a few items in the still-empty-looking fridge and arranged the rest haphazardly in one cupboard. He knew he should really wake Sherlock and get him to eat something, or else risk the man not sleeping through the night, but if he was asleep, then he was resting. Food could wait a couple of hours, John decided, as he carried their bags upstairs to unpack.

Upstairs, there was a small bathroom, containing an avocado suite that resonated with the decades that had elapsed since the house had last been decorated. There were only two bedrooms and they were of disparate sizes; without really thinking about it, John placed Sherlock’s suitcase, and the small hard case that contained his violin, in the larger room, and then went to the smaller one to unpack his own things. It didn’t take very long to place a week’s worth of clothes into a chest of drawers and the small wardrobe that comprised most of his bedrooms furniture. Seated on the single bed that would be his for the next six nights, John contemplated whether he should unpack Sherlock’s bag too. Going through his things felt slight odd, but then again, Sherlock didn’t seem to worry about keeping his belongings private in Baker Street; his stuff was all over the flat. And if John didn’t do it, Sherlock would only live out of a suitcase for the week, or fling things everywhere and leave him to tidy up before they left.

John headed into the larger bedroom and unzipped the small suitcase that he had placed on the bed. It revealed what John had expected; a selection of soberly coloured shirts, two pairs of dark trousers and a dark jacket, alongside the various other items of clothing necessary for a week away from home. Once those were folded and put away, John laid out Sherlock’s pyjamas on the bed and reached for the dressing gown that was rolled up in the bottom of the suitcase. As he did so, something heavy and hard landed with a metallic clunk on the floor. Looking down in surprise, John saw his service revolver starkly outline on the pale pink carpet.

Idiot, John thought as he snatched it up, checking, and thankfully establishing, that it wasn’t loaded. This quickly led to a search for the bullets, which Sherlock had hidden in the case for his electric razor. He knew what Sherlock had been thinking, you never did know when the pistol would come in useful, but the police here would not be as willing as Lestrade to turn a blind eye to an illegal firearm. There was the problem of what to do with it. Thinking quickly, John carried the gun downstairs and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Carrying it around wasn’t exactly wise, but at least then he knew where it was at all times – and it was always out of Sherlock’s hands.

Peering into the living room, John could see that Sherlock had shifted his position on the sofa slightly, but was still asleep. The sofa was too small for him to sleep on comfortably; he would wake up with a dull ache in his shoulder from being curled up against the arm. Still, John didn’t have the heart to wake him. There was a perfectly comfortable looking chair on the other side of the room, but John settled instead for sitting on the floor and leaning against the arm of the sofa. There, he could occasionally reach up and place a hand on Sherlock’s forehead, brushing back stray curls and feeling the quiet heat that radiated from it.

Sherlock woke just over half an hour later, just as the forgettable film had reached its climax and was knitting together the loose ends of its denouement. John felt movement behind him more purposeful than the semi-conscious shifts of slumber. Glancing around, he saw Sherlock blinking back the late-afternoon light and stifling a yawn into the back of one hand.

“Afternoon,” John said, with a smile. “Sleep well?” Sherlock nodded, and then winced as he tried to move what was, as John had correctly anticipated, a very stiff shoulder. “Country air is supposed to do that, isn’t it?”

“Old wives tale,” Sherlock mumbled hoarsely. “Or it’s that there isn’t anything to do except sleep.”

“Well, it’s good in any case,” John said, stretching himself and standing up. “You’re running a slight temperature; I’d like you to take something to bring it down.” There was no response. “Sherlock?”

“All right.” It was the least acquiescent acceptance that John had ever heard, but he would take it. He fetched the pills and a glass of water from the kitchen, and Sherlock swallowed them without debate, draining the glass of water for good measure.

“I know it’s early, but I thought I’d make a start on dinner – seeing as we missed lunch,” John said. “Are you hungry?”

“I’ll eat,” Sherlock replied, evading the question, his eyes fixed on the credits that were now rolling across the television screen.

“That’s good,” John said, and headed back into the kitchen. He knew was Sherlock was up to; he was being obedient enough to ensure that he was allowed back to London as soon as possible. John didn’t particular care about this. Eating well and resting would have the same effect whether they were performed with good grace or not, and John had long since stopped expecting to receive any thanks of the conventional kind for his dealings with Sherlock. Occasionally, a softened glance and a half smile let John know that his work didn’t go entirely unappreciated, and that was enough.

When John returned to the sitting room half an hour later with two plates of spaghetti bolognaise, he found Sherlock poking again at his lifeless phone.

“How do civilized people live out here?” he asked, placing his phone on the coffee table and taking a plate and set of cutlery from John’s hand.

“You get a signal on the main road,” John told him, sitting down in the chair with the plate on his lap. “I sent a message to Lestrade explaining that we wouldn’t be in touch for a few days. I assume Mycroft has spoken to him as well.”

“Undoubtedly.” Sherlock wound the long strings of pasta around his fork with practiced ease. “Mycroft probably told Lestrade not to contact us on pain of death. Or at least, on pain of cuts to his overtime budget.”

“Lestrade will manage,” John said. He swallowed a mouthful of spaghetti; it wasn’t bad considering the minimal ingredients sold by the village shop. He’d have to go to the supermarket in the morning. “You never did tell me what you were working on in London,” he added.

“It was dull,” Sherlock said. “If I’d been well enough to tackle it properly, it would have been wrapped up in twenty-four hours. Too tiresome even for your blog.” John nearly dropped his fork. It wasn’t the disparaging reference to his literary endeavour – he was used to those by now – but the admission of illness. After weeks of both of them skirting around the subject like it was made of hot coals, Sherlock dropped it casually into conversation as if they were discussing the weather. He noticed John’s surprise instantly.

“I’m not stupid, John. I know I’m not well.” There was a slight catch in Sherlock’s voice, and he cleared his throat roughly before continuing. “Whether I’m ill enough to be sent to this backwater is another matter. A couple more weeks and I’d have been fine, you know.”

“Or in hospital with double pneumonia – one or the other,” John replied, archly. There was an uncomfortable silence, filled only by the low ripple of the television. John relaxed the clenched hand that had been gripping his fork so tightly that the handle bit into his palm. “Tell me about the case,” he said, finally.

“It’s boring.”

“I don’t care, I want to hear about why you were so desperate to stay in London.”

“Fine - two bodies found in a disused underground station in East London; one male, one female, both in their early thirties. The only somewhat unusual point was that the male had been dead for two weeks longer than the female - and that he almost definitely didn’t die at the crime scene, whereas I'm almost certain that she did. I’d be absolutely sure if only I could have seen the crime scene.” Sherlock was rattling off the facts with a detached tone, in between mouthfuls of spaghetti. “She was married and by all accounts devoted to her husband, and his neighbours attest that he didn’t have a partner – so they probably weren’t lovers, and they aren’t biologically related. In fact, she didn’t know him at all, as far as Lestrade and his team can work out.”

“So why was she down there – especially if they weren’t killed at the same time?”

“That’s what Lestrade wanted to know. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? She was looking for the body.”

“But she didn’t know the dead man.”

“Come on, John, I know you can think. What else might prompt her to go looking for a body?” Sherlock’s face was ashen, and his voice was low and rasping, but there was something of the usual, almost playful, spark in his eye as he asked the question. “If she’s not looking for the victim…”

“The killer,” John said, suddenly getting where Sherlock was going. “She knew, or she thought she knew the killer.”

“Exactly. She was playing detective, and probably found exactly what she didn’t want to.”

“So, who did she suspect? You said she had a husband?” Sherlock shook his head.

“He’s in a wheelchair. There’s no way he’s dragging a body down there, and then killing someone else when they find it.”

“Who is it, then?”

“On balance, brother would be most likely. It’s almost certainly a family member that she’s concerned about, and her father would probably be too old to drag a body down into an abandoned station – this is all going on the probability that the murderer is a man, which it almost always is. I told Lestrade that he needs to look up her maiden name, and then find the connection to the first victim. Simple, really.”

“So all that stuff about needing to be in London to finish a case was absolute rubbish?” John said, angrily. Sherlock looked far from ashamed at this revelation.

“I had to tell you something; I had to think of a reason for you to let me stay in London,” he said calmly. “Anyway, it wasn’t entirely false. As of this morning, Lestrade hadn’t caught the man. I was expecting a message to that effect this afternoon, but…” His eyes glanced down to the perpetually silent phone. “That isn’t going to be happening any time soon apparently, even without Mycroft’s interference.” He looked up and found himself the subject of eyes that flashed with maddening disbelief. “Oh, what is it, John?” he asked sharply.

“You lied to me,” John snapped. “But why should I be surprised – you’ve been lying to me for weeks anyway. I was trying to help you, and you were going behind my back – but at least, I thought it was for important things, and now I find that it was… boring. You risked your health, and you lied to me, over something that was boring.”

“Less boring that doing nothing, which is what you wanted.” Sherlock’s eyes were steely, but his tone was less steady. “And you might want to think about exactly who was doing the lying to whom. I imagine there was a fair bit of self-deception taking place at the same time.” His voice cracked on the last syllable and he raised a hand to smother a wrenching cough. For the first time in weeks, the sound didn’t prompt a sympathetic ache in John’s chest.

“You might not care,” he said, raising his voice about the sound of Sherlock’s struggle for breath. “But you have to at least accept that other people do.” Suddenly devoid of any appetite, John put the half-eaten plate of pasta on the coffee table and walked purposefully towards the living room door.

“Where are you going?” Sherlock managed to say, between the spasms that consumed his lungs.

“For a lie down,” John replied, without looking back.


	5. Chapter 5

“Is that Earl Grey or English Breakfast with the cream teas?”

The waitress – young and enthusiastic – smiled brightly as looked up from the pad on which she’d scribbled John’s order. Sherlock returned her grin with a sardonic look in his eyes that John recognised as dangerous.

“Oh, English Breakfast, I think – don’t you, John?” he said, in a sing-song voice that was quite uncharacteristic. The waitress nodded, made a note of it and was turning to go when Sherlock added, “Do your parents run this tea room, by any chance?”

“Yes, they do,” the girl replied, cheerfully.

“Well, if you still want them to make a contribution to your gap year trip, you might want to be a little bit more careful about disguising the fact that you had a spliff along with your sandwich at lunchtime.” The girl visibly paled and her hands began to shake so violently that she nearly dropped her notebook. Without saying a single word more, she hurried back to the kitchen.

“Pity she ran off,” Sherlock continued, throwing the same wrenched smile at John. “I was going ask her where she got it from. Might make the long evenings with the telly a bit more exciting.”

“Sherlock, that wasn’t very fair.”

“She should have been more careful. She’s clearly been chewing gum or eating mints, and she reapplied her perfume recently. There were tiny shards of tobacco on her apron, so she’d been rolling a cigarette – but how many teenage girls do you know that have their hair highlighted every six weeks and also smoke roll-ups? So not a cigarette – must be a joint. That would have been enough, but there was also the packet of Rizla King Size in her pocket; real give-away.” He paused, satisfied with the explanation. “She should probably thank me, actually. Parents confronting you about your drug use is always so awkward.” The next question tripped off John’s tongue before he had time to trap it behind his teeth.

“And the gap year trip?”

“Bit of a guess, that one. The first page of her note book had the dates of the full moon for May, June and July – there’s probably a lot more than cannabis in Thailand. Of course, she might have been an amateur astronomer like that security guard at the gallery, but it seems I was right.” John sighed.

“What did we agree about giving the detective work a rest while we were here?” John sighed.

“If you weren’t trying to exact revenge by boring me to death, then I wouldn’t have to,” Sherlock relied curtly.

John didn’t respond. Truthfully, the tea room had been a revenge of sorts; he’d deliberately picked the one with the most doilies and the most elderly clientele; they were a good twenty-five years younger than any of the other customers. Neither of them had spoken much after Sherlock’s revelation about the case and the subsequent argument. John had gone to bed early, waking only once to hear the noise of Sherlock’s rasping coughs and strained breathing from the next room. He had thrown back the bedclothes, ready to go and loiter in his usual position in the doorway, but then had though better of it. _Let him suffer; see if I care._ He had rolled over to face away from the diving wall and closed his eyes.

The trip into Stow-on-the-Wold was a way of avoiding day-time television. The expected rain had begun in the night, giving way to a drizzly and damp morning. A drive into town seemed more conducive to improving Sherlock’s health than getting soaked on a walk through the fields. They’d made a brief sweep of the supermarket and then wandered into town itself to loiter at the windows of antique shops, examining the contents inside. If Sherlock was mentally cataloguing the past owners of each object, he kept it to himself.

They had stopped at a gift shop to buy a present for Mrs Hudson, settling on a teapot to atone for the various pieces of her crockery that had been smashed by uninvited guests or dissolved in the process of Sherlock’s experiments. John had also picked up a guidebook that gave details on things to see and do in the local area; he was aware that tea rooms couldn’t occupy every wet afternoon for the rest of the week. Sherlock, habitually disdainful of pockets of trivial, useless information, hadn’t complained.

That guidebook now lay between them on the table and John, trying to avoid the potential argument that hung heavy in the air, picked it up and, thinking of nothing better to look up, turned to the page on Upper Slaughter. It was short (the place must be quiet, even by Cotswold standards) but it did solve the mystery of the village’s familiar name. It was from Mr Kincaid’s A-Level history classes on the First World War. _Upper Slaughter,_ the guidebook said, _is one of only thirty-two Thankful Villages identified in Arthur Mee’s ‘The King’s England’, meaning that all the men from the village who served in the Great War returned…_

John was jolted away from the text by Sherlock’s phone beeping just as a different waitress – matronly and with enough similar features to the first girl to make John suspect that this was probably the oblivious mother – brought over a tray containing two pots of tea, a plate of scones and two small pots containing jam and cream. The Sherlock snatched up the device with feverish excitement.

“Lestrade,” he said, as his eyes scanned the screen. He looked up at John. “I was right; it was the brother. The body of the man belonged to his business partner, who was in the process of suing the suspect for misuse of company funds. They haven’t caught up with him yet, but it’s only a matter of time. And besides, this message was probably sent hours ago.” The mention of the case riled John, and he felt his shoulders tense as he scraped jam across the surface of a scone rather too roughly.

“Wonderful,” he replied through clenched teeth, reaching for the cream. Sherlock was silent as he carefully poured two perfectly equal cups of tea. Placing the pot back on the tray, he cradled the cup between his longer fingers as he trapped John’s gaze in the maelstroms of his eyes.

“I am sorry if I upset you,” Sherlock said, evenly stressing each word. John could tell he had been contemplating the apology for some time.

“There’s no ‘if,’” John said coldly. “But you already knew that.”

“Sorry that I upset you, then. It wasn’t my intention.”

“Your intention was to get your own way, and damn anyone else who might be involved.”

“But you already knew that,” Sherlock countered. The sly smile flitted, strangely unconvincingly, across his features for a split second before he was forced to stifle a cough into the sleeve of his jacket and take a hurried sip of his tea. If it was too hot, then he didn’t flinch. John took a tentative bite of his scone, its sweetness cloying at the back of his throat. “There’s nothing else I can say that isn’t a lie,” Sherlock added, a sense of finality creeping into his voice; he was staring at John again.

“All right, apology accepted.” For an instant, nothing but warmth exuded from Sherlock’s gaze, and he uncoiled his right hand from his cup to snatch a scone.

“It may be traditional in Devon,” he said, reaching for the two small pots. “But I’ve never understood people who put the cream on before the jam; far more messy and far less efficient.” John smiled; the second bite of his scone seemed to taste much better.

It began to rain again as they walked back to the car; fat, heavy drops that thudded noisily against the yellow stone buildings and exploded as they made contact with the pavement. The damp seemed to work its way into Sherlock’s lungs with astonishing speed, and his fits of coughing increased in both length and ferocity over the twenty minutes it took them to return to the car park. Once in the car and out of the rain, John, who was allowing himself to be concerned once more, placed the back of his hand against Sherlock’s cheek; Sherlock’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t move or push John’s hand away. The embers of a worryingly familiar heat burnt beneath the chill that then wind and rain had painted onto his skin.

“It’s exhausting,” Sherlock said, softly and suddenly. “And it can be difficult to think.”

“I know,” John replied, reluctantly removing his hand and turning the key in the ignition. They drove the whole way home in silence.

*

“Stop.” John had barely walked three paces away from the car, two plastic shopping bags in each hand, when he felt Sherlock’s hand on his shoulder. “Someone’s been here.” Sherlock walked purposely over to the flower bed that lay below the living room window. “These plants weren’t bent like this when we left this morning.” Shaking his head at how anyone, even Sherlock, could remember that, John placed the shopping on the path and walked over beside him. The stalks of the not-yet-bloomed daffodils were crumpled in two distinct places.

“It might be an animal,” John suggested. “A fox. Or someone’s dog.” Sherlock shook his head and squatted down, examining the flower bed more closely.

“There are footprints. It’s a person, not an animal – a person who was standing there a while, because they’re deep. Size ten, I’d say – which means it’s very likely to have been a man. And a man who isn’t from around here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Look at the imprint. Just use your eyes and look!” John stared at the none-too-clear footprints in the soil for ten seconds or more. As always, the evidence that was apparently screaming at Sherlock said nothing to him.

“No, I don’t see it. Explain,” he demanded tersely.

“It’s cold and its wet today. The ground is muddy, waterlogged even. If you were going out for a walk, what shoes would you wear?”

“Trainers – maybe Wellington boots,” John ventured.

“You’re a sensible man, John. Most people are sensible too. So most people wouldn’t wear shoes with a slight heel and a smooth leather sole; you’d ruin them and probably fall over too. The only reason why you’d wear shoes like this, if you were planning to trample through a flower bed, is if you didn’t have any other shoes with you. What kind of person only has one pair of shoes with them – someone who is just visiting.”

“Ok, so it’s a tourist,” John conceded. “Someone who got lost and looked in at the window to see if anyone was in, so they could ask for directions?” Sherlock shook his head.

“The weather forecast for the south-west of England was for rain; Mycroft told us that much. Besides, people come to places like this to walk – they bring hiking boots. This is someone who wasn’t expecting to come here, who left in a rush. Not a tourist.” Sherlock stopped stood up, and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “It doesn’t fit together,” he muttered.

He was breathing heavily, and his eyes seemed to be both extraordinarily bright and sunken into shadow against his pale skin and dripping tendrils of hair. The anguish that seemed to arise in Sherlock from an inability to fuse the pieces of the puzzle was almost harder to watch that any physical pain. Gently, John placed a hand in the small of Sherlock’s back and guided him towards the front door, slipping the key into the lock.

“Go on inside, out of the cold,” he said calmly. “I’ll only be a second.” Sherlock obliged, slipping through slither of light and warmth in the doorway and into the cottage.

Having rescued the soggy shopping bags, John hurried back towards the house. He lingered for a moment at the flowerbed. The rain was already blurring the edges of the footprints into the dark soil.


	6. Chapter 6

“You needn’t look upstairs.” Sherlock’s voice filtered weakly through the living room doorway just as John had placed his foot on the first stair. “I checked the door as you let me in. There was no sign of someone tampering with the lock or trying to force it open. Whoever he was, he hasn’t been inside.”

“Right. Good. I need to go upstairs anyway,” John called back. As he continued up the stairs, the heavy lump of metal in his inside pocket jolted gently against his ribs. He’d been conscious of it all day, not least when he’d reached into the same pocket looking for his wallet and felt the cold smoothness of the barrel on the back of his knuckles. He’d have to find something to do with it, but with someone apparently lurking outside their windows, leaving it in the house wasn’t safe either.

He found what he was looking for lying in the bottom of his bag, the one item that he had not unpacked. Although, he hadn’t really been a doctor for a while now – not what he thought of as being a doctor, that is, dealing every day with the myriad of ways in which the mechanics of the human body could go awry – old habits died hard. He didn’t feel comfortable going anywhere without it. He never knew when he might need it. Taking off his jacket and laying in neatly on the end of the bed, John hung his stethoscope around his neck and went back downstairs.

“I’m not -” Sherlock began, before John cut him off, but there was really little resistance in his voice. He was sitting on the sofa, arms hugging his coat around his chest, seemingly oblivious to the heat of the room and the fire burning in the grate.

“Yes, you are.” John blew onto the end of the stethoscope and rubbed it between his hands, his eyes never leaving Sherlock’s. Sherlock kept his arms tightly wrapped around himself for a few moments. Then, seeing that John was not going to be deterred, flung them open and sunk back into the chintz of the sofa.

John knelt down on the floor in front of Sherlock. Carefully, he peeled back the layers of Sherlock’s clothing – first the coat, which he slipped off Sherlock’s shoulders, then the jacket, which he opened, and finally the shirt, which he unbuttoned only enough to slip the stethoscope against Sherlock’s chest. As it hit the skin, there was a sharp intake of breath.

“Sorry,” John whispered. Silently and quickly, the instrument skimmed over Sherlock’s chest. It paused occasionally for a few seconds, during which John’s eyebrows would furrow in concentration. Eventually, the brows stayed furrowed and he removed the stethoscope and began re-buttoning the shirt.

“Well?” Sherlock said, the roughness in his voice creeping in even as he spoke softly.

“Bronchitis would be my diagnosis. Viral – it most often is. Which means rest and lots of fluids. But you should have a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia,” John added soberly.

“Do you think it’s pneumonia?” Sherlock asked, in the same level tone that he used when asking John’s opinion about a body in Barts mortuary.

“No, I don’t, but -”

“Then no x-ray. You’re a good doctor; I trust that your diagnosis is correct.” Sherlock was beginning to untie the laces on his shoes, which, John noted, were also not intended for the country. The sleek black leather was spattered with dots of clay-coloured mud.

“It isn’t a proper diagnosis. I’ve only listened to your chest,” John snapped. “Look, the local A&E probably closes at five like everything else around here. If we leave now, you might have a hope of being seen before they shut.”

“I’m not going to a hospital,” Sherlock replied. “But I would like some more painkillers.” John did not respond but instead pulled his stethoscope sharply away from his neck. “John, if its bronchitis and its viral, then it’s self-limiting and I’ll get better soon. Particularly with all this rest you’re subjecting me to.” He broke away to cough harshly and John interrupted took his chance to cut in.

“If it’s bronchitis, if it’s viral…” Sherlock gasped for breath and interrupted him.

“I’d like some painkillers, please,” he said, before the coughing began again. Holding the stethoscope too tightly, John was already half way to the kitchen when the phone began to ring. He snatched it up in frustration, knowing whose voice was going to greet him.

“You know, you really can leave that satellite navigation system in the car. Nothing will happen to it.” John bit his bottom lip. Really he had just slipped it into his pocket out of habit, rather than because of any notion of keeping it safe. He wouldn’t give Mycroft the satisfaction of knowing that, however.

“If I didn’t bring it inside, how would you know when to call?” he replied smoothly. There was a soft chuckle on the other end of the line.

“Quite. Did you enjoy your day in Stow?”

“We bought Mrs Hudson a teapot.”

“How charming. And is there anything to report?” John’s thoughts flickered to the footprints outside. Mycroft would want to know about those. Whether Sherlock would want him to know was quite another matter. John answered evasively.

“Sherlock, you mean? Much the same, I suppose. He ate a cream tea, if that’s an indicator of anything.” If Mycroft noticed a hesitancy in John’s voice then he chose not to comment on it.

“And do you require my assistance at all?”

“Actually, yes.” If he won’t go for an x-ray… John’s thoughts ran to something he had tucked into his wallet some time ago. Hopefully, they were still there. He fished it from the pocket of his jeans and opened it, peering into the pocket behind where he kept banknotes, reserved for receipts, bus tickets and scraps of paper. There they were. “I need you to make a prescription form disappear.” There was a frosty silence for a second.

“Is my brother..?”

“It’s preventative,” John said quickly. “A precautionary measure.” Mycroft cleared his throat in a way that suggested he was assuaged.

“I take it that the form will be printed with the details of the surgery in which you worked for a brief period, but at which you are no longer employed?”

“That’s right. It will also have a forged signature on it and…” He paused. “Sarah was decent about far too much for far too long. She doesn’t need to get into trouble again because of me and Sherlock.”

“Give me the number of the form,” Mycroft said, sharply. John read out the ten digits on the bottom of the green slip of paper. “You need to take this to a pharmacy in Evesham, on the High Street, opposite NatWest bank. It’s a thirty minute drive away. No questions will be asked. The prescription will be filled and then the form destroyed.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“I don’t think… Wait, Sherlock will want to know – has Lestrade got the man he was looking for? The brother, I mean.” It was Mycroft’s turn to pause.

“No. He seems to be rather good at evading the long arm of the law.” A note of peevish annoyance had invaded his voice. “Of course, I could set my people on it, but that would require so much paperwork. Besides, we know he hasn’t left the country. It won’t be long before they catch up with him.”

“If you say so,” John said. “I should go now; I need to get to the pharmacy before it closes. You’re sure that…?”

“As though it had never existed. Goodbye, John.” As always, Mycroft did not wait for a response before hanging up. John poured a glass of water and pushed the last two painkillers from the packet; he’d have to pick some more up when he went to fill the prescription he was about to write.

“What did my brother want?” Sherlock hadn’t moved from where he was sitting on the sofa, except to curl his legs up next to him. John handed him the glass and the tablets.

“Just checking on you. Maybe we should buy him a teapot as well.” Sherlock scowled and swallowed the pills. “I asked him whether they’d caught your murderer.”

“And?” Sherlock looked up sharply.

“Not yet, apparently. But he hasn't left the country and Mycroft thinks it’s only going to be a matter of time before Lestrade finds him.” Joan sat down next to the coffee table, fished a pen from the pocket of his jeans and then began to fill out the prescription form. Name of patient...

“That’s a prescription,” Sherlock said, looking over his shoulder. “And that’s my name.”

“Great deduction,” John replied, filling out the name of the antibiotic and the required dosage.

“You said it was probably viral.”

“I also said that I couldn’t be sure you haven’t got pneumonia, and, since you won’t have a chest x-ray, my only option is a preventative course of antibiotics.”

John paused when he got to the signature. Even if Mycroft was going to make it as though this had never happened, it still felt wrong. He scribbled a signature for the initials and surname printed on the form - _sorry, Sarah_ \- and dated it on the line below, then folded it up and put it in his pocket.

“You can get a custodial sentence for that,” Sherlock said coolly.

“Mycroft is dealing with it.”

“Thank you,” Sherlock said, quickly. “You’ve been good about all this.”

“No,” said John, standing up and going to fetch his coat from the bedroom. “I’m forging prescriptions and encouraging antibiotic resistance. I wouldn’t call that good.”

“I need you to do something for me,” Sherlock called after him. Having to raise his voice obviously hurt Sherlock’s chest; John saw him wincing in pain as he spun around.

“What?”

“Text Lestrade when you get a signal. Ask him what he’s doing about my murderer.” There was something unusually pressing in the tone of his words.

“Is this man dangerous?” John asked, lingering in the doorway.

“He has killed two people, John.”

“You know what I mean.” Sherlock shrugged.

“Probably not. Both of the killings were motivated by some immediate need for self-preservation. Neither was executed in a particularly dextrous manner. Violent, yes. Clever, no. I think we’ll be all right.”

*

Evesham was not a pretty town, at least, not after Stow. But it seemed more like the sort of place in which people actually lived. It had a slightly grim sense that seemed to come from shops in which items were too cheap to be made properly, and pubs that were a too empty to be friendly. But perhaps that was just the damp that chilled the air, even though the rain had ceased for the moment. John noticed the CCTV camera that was pointed precisely at the one empty parking space outside the pharmacy. He almost waved.

The shop was marked open, but was completely empty, save for the young pharmacist who took the prescription from him, looking pale and a more than a little shaken. She visibly started when she saw the number on the form and read the details, rushing off to fetch the necessary medication without saying a single word. When John got his wallet out to pay the charge she held her hands up to refuse the money, even for the painkillers that he had picked up from the shelf. Stepping two paces back from the counter and still remaining silent, her eyes begged him to disappear and never come back.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. He picked the paper bag up from the counter and left.

Outside, it was beginning to rain once more, drops falling softly and intermittently from the sky, heralding that more would soon follow. As John walked back towards the car, something caught his eye. A hounds-tooth check coat that he had seen before on a figure with familiar greying hair; it was the man who was looking for the church in Upper Slaughter. He was seated in a cafe over the road, staring at John’s car over the top of a newspaper. If he was leaving today, then he was leaving it rather late to get back to… No, he hadn’t said where he was from. Maybe he’d decided to stay a few more days.

Realising that John was looking at him, the man nodded and waved rather uncomfortably. John awkwardly returned the gesture, wondering whether he should cross the road and say hello. He decided against it. There was something about the way that the man was gripping the newspaper that suggested he didn’t want to be disturbed. And the fact that, now John looked at it again, it wasn’t a newspaper he was reading, but a map. Looking for some more memorials with names on, John thought, as he opened the car door.

He was about to turn the key in the ignition when he remembered the other part of his task, and pulled his phone from his coat pocket.

 _Sherlock wants to know if you’ve caught his murderer yet._

The reply was almost immediate.

 _Give us a chance. This man has over 100 registered company addresses. We’re getting there. Lestrade._

It was quickly followed by another message from the same number.

 _And isn’t he supposed to be on holiday?_

John smiled to himself as he started the engine; if only it were that simple.


	7. Chapter 7

Both John and Sherlock, unusually, slept late into the morning, only to be greeted, upon waking, by a sky that portended more drizzle. Constantly flicking through the five channels that the television offered, Sherlock dismissed any suggestion John could come up with for how they might spend the day. The Model Village at Bourton-on-the-Water was quickly dismissed as dull, an opinion with which John silently agreed. A National Trust house that had looked promising dropped out of contention when Sherlock, reading the guidebook over John’s shoulder, pointed out that it didn’t reopen for the spring until the first weekend of April. The final straw came when John read out the entry that described a walk from Broadway village up to its eighteenth century tower, and Sherlock made a noise that didn’t signal absolute disapproval, only for a drumming noise outside of the window to signal that the rain, portended all morning, had now recommenced. John slammed the paperback shut, tossed the box of antibiotics at Sherlock and stalked off to heat up soup for lunch. They would be going nowhere that day.

When John returned with two bowls of rather dismal-looking vegetable soup – the selection offered by the small supermarket had been less-than-overwhelming - Sherlock was seated by the coffee table, pouring over what appeared to be an ancient, and rather incomplete, Scrabble set.

“Harry and I used to play that on Boxing Day,” John said, setting down the lunch.

“It was banned in our house,” Sherlock said as he turned over the small, yellowing tiles, eyes cataloguing them as he did so. “Neither Mycroft nor my father was very good at losing.” John didn’t imagine that Sherlock had taken being beaten at board games particularly well either. Sherlock drew the bowl towards himself, ate a mouthful and added, “It’s missing the K, an O and two Es.”

“That just makes it more of a challenge, doesn’t it?” John said, with a half-smile. Sherlock rolled his eyes, and then brushed the letters off the edge of the table and back into the dingy cloth bag.

“You had better not be as bad at this as you are at chess,” he muttered, shaking the bag and plucking out seven tiles.

Three hours, seven games and dozens of triple-word-scores later, John conceded defeat for the last time. It had been, if not a respectable showing, at least not as awful at his attempts at chess; checkmate in five moves was apt to bruise even the most self-depreciating of egos. Besides, it had killed a substantial portion of the afternoon. Outside the window, and through the still-pouring rain, the light was beginning to fade.

“I’m still not sure about tyronic,” John said, as he folded the board up.

“Adjective meaning like a beginner. As in, ‘John’s performance at Scrabble was positively tyronic’,” Sherlock said, swallowing another tablet with the cup of tea that John had just brewed. “You can check it when we get back to a part of the country where the internet exists.”

“I know where we can check it,” John said. “There was a pub in a village I drove through yesterday that said it had wireless access. You can connect your phone there.” Sherlock looked up wryly, dark eyes glistening against pale, hollow cheeks.

“Isn’t that against the rules, Doctor Watson?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go spare if I spend the rest of the evening sitting in this living room and I don’t want to cook this evening. Besides, I know you want to find out if Lestrade’s caught your double-murderer yet. So I won’t tell if you won’t.”

 

The White Hart at Cutsdean was quiet. It was only just after six when they arrived and so the locals hadn’t made their appearances; the only customers were tourists like themselves, only fresh from hillside walks and historic houses. John could have sworn that one elderly couple had been sitting with them in the tea room yesterday, a feeling that increased when he caught the wife smiling at him. He smiled back; that sort of thing didn’t happen much in London.

“Have a drink,” Sherlock said, as they entered.

“Someone has to drive home,” John said, looking rather longingly at the beer pumps lined up along the bar.

“I think they still have taxis here, John,” Sherlock replied. “And it’s not as though we have anywhere to be tomorrow morning, more’s the pity.”

John carried two pints of locally-brewed bitter, the landlord’s recommendation, over to the table where Sherlock was sitting, hunched over his mobile phone tapping furiously at the keypad.

“Well?” he asked, setting down the glasses.

“One second. Lestrade’s changed the… Ah. Same one as six months ago. He’s getting lazy,” Sherlock replied, leaning back in his chair.

“Same what? Same password? Are you hacking into Scotland Yard?”

“I can read his report from this afternoon. It’s quicker than e-mailing him and should be an accurate presentation of the facts. Well, mostly accurate.” John took a long sip of his beer and decided to bite his tongue.

“Have they caught him, then?”

“No.” Sherlock’s narrowed eyes suggested he wasn’t at ease with this apparent lack of progress. “No, they haven’t.”

“Lestrade said last night that the brother had a lot of company addresses. They must still be checking those.” Sherlock made a sound that suggested he wasn’t convinced.

“Lestrade might be entirely lacking in inspiration, but he is usually efficient. This man isn’t a master criminal; he’s a rather thuggish murderer who killed to protect himself. More than that, the police haven’t told the press that they’ve found these bodies, so he shouldn’t know that they're after him. He doesn’t have a particular reason to hide. They ought to have found him by now. I ought to tell Mycroft to put some effort into it.” A rasp was creeping into Sherlock’s voice and he took a sip of the beer, grimacing as he swallowed it. “You enjoy this stuff?” he asked John incredulously.

 

John managed three pints and Sherlock less than a half before John decided that Sherlock’s cough, always worse in the evenings, was getting bad enough for it to be time to return home. Mobile phone signal in Cutsdean was apparently as bad as in Upper Slaughter, so John had the landlord phone a taxi for them.

“He said we should wait at the bottom of the car park,” John told Sherlock, handing him his coat. “Besides, I should get the sat nav from the car so Mycroft can know that I didn’t keep you out all night.”

As they walked out of the pub and into its small car park, John did a double take. The space in which he had parked the car a few hours previously was now starkly empty. Though he knew he had parked it there, John scanned every other space for any trace of the missing vehicle, even going so far as to walk up to the bay in question to check it really was empty. Sherlock stood in the doorway of the pub and rolled his eyes.

“So much for your brother’s assurances about the lack of crime in rural Gloucestershire,” John said, darkly. “I didn’t leave it unlocked, did I?”

“I’d have told you if you did,” Sherlock replied. “Strange they took our car, though. It’s not the most expensive – that’s the BMW in the far corner, only six months old – and not the easiest to break into; you wouldn’t even need a screwdriver to force open the door on that Metro.”

“Car thieves aren’t logical, Sherlock,” John snapped, still staring at the empty space as if the car might reappear at any instant. “Maybe I should go back inside and phone the police? No, forget it. They’ll be long gone by now. It can wait until we get home. Besides, Mycroft will be able to find it with the sat nav. Good job we decided on that taxi.”

As they walked to the end of the car park and stood underneath the streetlight, a car that was driving down the road began to slow down and indicate left. But rather than turning into the pub car park, the driver pulled into the side of the road and lowered the passenger side window.

“Hello – didn’t I see you in Upper Slaughter the other day?” said a voice that John recognised. Leaning down towards the window, he saw that the driver was the man with the map. The man he’d also seen in the café in Evesham yesterday. Apparently you did run into people more frequently in the countryside.

“Yes, you did,” John said. “I thought you would have gone home by now.”

“The vicar at the church gave me a few pointers as to where I might find some more evidence, so I decided to stay a couple more days,” the man replied cheerily. Sherlock's eyes narrowed at the word "evidence"; John decided to dissuade him from asking questions immediately.

“About his family history, Sherlock. This is… Sorry, I don’t think I ever got your name,” John said.

“Phil,” said the man in the car. “And you are?”

“John, and this is my friend Sherlock.”

“The one you’re on holiday with. Good night in the pub?”

“Well, it was until our car got stolen,” John said, gesturing back towards the empty parking space. Phil looked shocked, then tutted and shook his head.

“Probably kids joyriding, don’t you think?”

“Not very likely,” Sherlock interjected. “There was no smashed glass, or paint chippings or anything to suggest the door had been forced. It was someone who knew what he was doing.” Phil looked a little nervous; it was an expression that John was used to seeing in those who were experiencing Sherlock’s deductions for the first time.

“You sound like a policeman,” he said, his attempt at a laugh coming out more like a strangled yelp.

“Not quite,” Sherlock told him, coolly.

“So can I give you a lift back to the village?” Phil asked. “It’s not out of my way.”

“Thanks, but we called a taxi and I-” John began.

“Oh, it’ll take ages to arrive and they cost a bloody fortune around here. Come on, it must be freezing in that rain. You’ll have to both get in the back, I’m afraid. I’ve got some boxes of paper on the front seat.” A click suggested that Phil had released the central locking. John looked over to Sherlock, who shrugged his shoulders and opened the nearside passenger door.

Phil pulled away at a pace that felt a little too fast for the winding country roads ahead of them, reapplying the central locking as he did so. As they left the village, John became even more aware of how dark it really got at night when you were away from the city. Once the streetlights ended, outside of the beams of the car headlamps, everything was obscured by the heavy blackness. John wondered why Sherlock was staring so intensely out of the window as he tried to stifle a cough into the sleeve of his coat; he couldn’t possibly see anything out there.

“Did you find your great uncle’s name?” John asked, as the lights of the village disappeared from the rear view mirror.

“Yes, I did, thanks. It was very moving.” Phil’s voice didn’t seem quite so cheerful now; perhaps he was concentrating on the driving. But he couldn’t be concentrating that hard because he sailed straight past the right-hand junction that should have taken them back towards Upper Slaughter.

“You’ve missed the turn,” John ventured.

“There’s another way,” Phil said, in a strangely flat tone. Sherlock had turned away from the window and was now listening intently. He flicked his eyes over to John, before asking in a tone that someone who didn’t know him might have mistaken for friendly interest.

“You’re from London, aren’t you, Phil?” Sherlock asked.

“Are you sure you’re not the police?” The intonation suggested that the phrase was meant as a joke, but there was nothing light about the way that Phil was staring into his mirror, right at the two of them.

“Your uncle was killed at Galipoli, right?” John said quickly. Sherlock’s eyes asked him why this was important. Just trust me, John said with a silent nod.

“Yeah, that’s right.” In the dark and amongst an unfamiliar setting, John’s sense of direction wasn’t at its best. But he could tell that they weren’t going in the right direction. They were headed away from Upper Slaughter and away from Stow.

“No, it’s not,” John said. “Or at least, you told me it was Paschendale two days ago. Neither is actually right, of course, because Upper Slaughter doesn’t have a memorial for the First World War.”

“Doesn’t it?” Phil asked, as though he didn’t really care very much.

“No, it’s a Thankful Village. Didn’t lose any men in the First World War. It’s in the guidebook.”

“And I thought your friend was the detective,” Phil muttered. He must have stamped his foot on the accelerator, because the car jolted forward and the engine shrieked.

“I am,” Sherlock said. “Seems you were right, John. I have been a little off my game recently. Back on top of things now though, don’t you worry, Phil. Philip Harrigan, isn’t it? I think I’ve met your sister. She won’t remember me, of course, on account of half her skull being smashed in at the time.”


	8. Chapter 8

Phil – Harrigan – whoever he was, he didn’t reply. He stared straight out of the windscreen at the road ahead. The car continued to accelerate. Sitting behind the driver’s seat, John couldn’t see the speedometer, but he knew that they couldn’t be doing less than 60 miles per hour.

“Well, John,” Sherlock was saying. “It looks like I was right in my assessment of Mr. Harrigan here.”

“What’s that?” John snapped. He didn’t really want to know what Sherlock was alluding to. He really wanted Sherlock to stop talking so that they two of them could think of a way out of this car.

“Violent, yes. Clever, no.” Harrigan still didn’t say anything. “Because if you were clever, even a little bit clever, you’d realise that killing us isn’t going to save you. That is what you plan to do, I assume, to kill us? Bury the bodies in some Cotswold copse where no one will ever find them?”

“Something like that,” Harrigan muttered, suddenly taking a sharp left turn that nearly pulled the car onto two wheels.

“For that to work, I’d have to be the only one who knows where your bodies were hidden. And I’m not.” Sherlock’s voice was beginning to crack. He paused and swallowed hard. “If you stayed around after I’d left instead of following me back to Baker Street – because that’s obviously how you followed John and I here – then you’d have seen that your next set of visitors were the Metropolitan police. Who do you think examines two dead bodies and doesn’t inform the police?”

“I didn’t see you go to the police,” Harrigan snarled. “And there hasn’t been anything in the papers.”

“That’s because I told them to keep it quiet until they had you. And I didn’t have to go to the police; they come to me.”

“I didn’t take my eyes off you from the moment you left their bodies,” Harrigan continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard Sherlock speak. “No police. I assumed you were a private detective that Tom’s family had hired. They didn’t seem to think the police were doing much to find him.”

“Tom your business partner,” Sherlock said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t a question. “The one you defrauded out of – how much money was it exactly? D.I. Lestrade failed to inform me.”

“Three quarters of a million, give or take,” Harrigan replied. He sounded less angry now, almost proud of his achievement. “I was clever there, wasn’t I?”

“A veritable little Enron,” Sherlock said. “Only not so clever that you didn’t get caught.” He was silent for a moment. “Gambling. That’s why you did it. You’re a gambler.” Harrigan looked more surprised on hearing this information than he had when Sherlock had told him that the police were onto him.

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, I do. There are two betting slips in the ashtray of the car; since this is clearly a hire-car, they must belong to you. And you’d have to be a gambler to take on two men alone. It doesn’t give you very good odds.” The cool, sardonic tone of Sherlock’s statement was utterly ruined by the wracked cough that followed immediately afterwards. John could tell that Sherlock had been trying to control it for some time, trying not to show Harrigan any weakness. Now, it was tearing through his lungs, sounding particularly awful in the confines of the car. Harrigan smirked.

“I’ve beaten worse,” he said cruelly. “I’ll take my chances. Besides, you don’t look in the best of shape.” Sherlock stared darkly into the rear view mirror. “Anyway,” Harrigan continued, “I’ve got something else to stack the odds on my side.” He reached down to his left and flicked open the glove compartment. In the dim light of the its backlight, John could see a handgun lying on the shelf. From this distance and in the darkness, he couldn’t tell if it was real or fake – safer to assume the former, then. And, unlike the one that was currently burning through his jacket pocket, he had to assumed it would be loaded. “Gives me the edge, I think.”

“People will be looking for us soon. Not just the police; people you really don’t want to cross,” John said. “They’ll find the car.”

“It’s parked outside your cottage,” Harrigan replied. “It’ll be a while before anyone notices something is wrong.”

“John could probably break your neck from where he is,” Sherlock interjected, his breath still coming in gaps and snatches. “You wouldn’t even have time to reach for that little toy of yours, let alone aim it.” Phil laughed.

“And then what? I’d crash the car. The hills around here are pretty steep. Lots of sharp corners on the roads. Maybe even oncoming traffic. Yeah, I’d die, but it probably wouldn’t end well for the both of you either.” John hated to admit it, but Harrigan had a point. Trying to do anything while he was driving was stupid. Pulling his eyes away from the rear view mirror he saw that Sherlock was staring at him.

John narrowed his eyebrows. What? Sherlock tugged at the lapel of his own jacket. John rolled his eyes and nodded – of course Sherlock knew his gun was there.

“Empty,” John said, very softly. If Harrigan heard, he didn’t say anything. Sherlock rolled his eyes dramatically, and stifled another cough. A car drove past them and briefly lit up the backseats of the car; in the harsh glow, Sherlock’s eyes appeared dangerously bright. When Harrigan was fixated on the road, John risked leaning across and placing one hand against Sherlock’s cheek. Sherlock flinched away instantly, but not before John had felt the heat that was searing from his skin.

Harrigan must have planned this, John thought, as the three men fell into a taut silence. The man seemed to know the roads remarkably well. He took every corner at speed and he was managing to avoid villages altogether; John hadn’t seen a single house in the last ten minutes. The small, old-fashioned signposts that marked the junctions were almost invisible, and certainly illegible, in the darkness. John had lost track of the turns they had taken, but his sense was that they were going North-East, and that the ground was getting higher. Maybe Sherlock was having better luck at working out where they were going.

He was baiting Harrigan again. “For all you know I might have called the police already,” Sherlock said. “You don’t need a signal for emergency numbers. My phone might be on in my pocket. They could be hearing all of this.”

“But they aren’t,” Harrigan said coolly, and John knew he was right. “And what would they know even if they were listening? Neither of you have any idea where we are.” Suddenly the car began to slow down. A few hundred meters ahead, John could make out the outline of a lay-by on the left hand side of the road, little more than a section of the grass verge that had been cleared away. Harrigan pulled the car into it, and reached for his pistol before turning off the engine.

“Since you’re both so clever,” he said, filling the adjective with particular venom, “you’ll know how stupid it would be to try to run away.” Harrigan dragged John from the car first, and John felt the rain water begin to seep down the back of his neck. In the darkness, John still couldn’t get a good look at the weapon to see whether or not it was real. With more evidence, it might have been worth the risk, but guessing wasn’t a good idea; Sherlock had taught him that much.

Ramming the gun between John’s shoulder blades - Better than a vest full of explosives - he then forced John to open the door on the passenger side. Sherlock swung his long legs out without having to be asked and looked rather bored as he allowed himself to be herded over to a five-bar gate. A light suddenly emerged from behind them; Harrigan must have pulled a torch from his pocket. He directed the beam on to a chain that locked the gate to the wooden fence post.

“It’s been cut,” he said, allowing the ‘by me’ to remain implied. John felt the toe of a shoe connect with the back of his kneecap. Smooth leather sole, he thought, and found himself smiling. “Open it,” Harrigan ordered. John did as he was asked and the man began to march them along a path that led up a hill.

The insipid light of the torch wasn’t really strong enough to guide them along the uneven ground, especially in the driving rain. John found himself stumbling almost every other step. By his side, he could hear Sherlock doing the same. He could also hear his friend’s ragged and desperate breathing. The hill wasn’t that steep, and Harrigan wasn’t making them keep a particularly strenuous pace – at least, not for a man who chased criminals around London three times a fortnight. Out here on the hillside, in the rain, Sherlock sounded worse than ever.

The thought crossed John's mind that he should try to make a run for it – take the chance that the gun was a fake, or that Harrigan wasn’t enough of a crack shot to hit a moving target in the darkness. If Sherlock had been well, he’d probably have tried it; in many ways, he was as much of a gambling man as his abductor. But if he made a run for it, they’d inevitably be separated. If Harrigan wasn’t a complete idiot, he’d go after the man who was obviously weaker – the one he was more likely to catch. That was, if he didn’t just shoot Sherlock the second that John took off. Neither of those outcomes could be called desirable. So John kept walking, trying not to listen to Sherlock’s rattling chest, and silently praying that his friend had enough energy to face whatever was going to happen next.

They were only a few paces in front of the hut when John first managed to make out its outline in the pale glow of the torch-beam. It couldn’t even really be called a hut. It was a rundown structure with a flat roof and no windows, approximately the size of a garden shed. It looked like a strong gust of wind might pull it to the ground. Two meters from the doorway, Harrigan shouted at them to stop, switched the torch into the hand that held the gun and directed the light into Sherlock’s face. Sherlock blinked, but didn’t flinch. John heard a jangling noise and saw Harrigan thrust a key, attached to a metal chain, towards Sherlock.

“Take this,” he said. “And open the padlock on that door.” Sherlock didn’t reach for it instantly.

“Surely you’re not going to kill us inside when the rain would helpfully wash away the crime scene?” he said sardonically.

“Of course not,” Harrigan snarled. “There’s a spade inside. You’re going to dig your own graves first.” Sherlock stared at him for an instant in silence.

“Nice touch,” he said softly and, taking the key from Harrigan’s hand, walked up to the door. He bent over the lock, as though he were struggling to find the keyhole and then tugged at the door. The wood clattered as he repeatedly pulled the lock towards him.

“What’s the matter?” Harrigan yelled. “Get on with it.”

“The lock is stuck,” Sherlock said, calmly. “I can’t open it.”

Harrigan must have either been losing his patience or losing his nerve, because it was at that moment that he did something very stupid. Torch in one hand, and gun in the other, he walked over to Sherlock and in doing so, he turned his back towards John. John didn’t even think. Pulling the gun from his pocket, he threw the lump of metal – useful only as a blunt object – at the back of Harrigan’s head. The sound of it connecting with the bone of his skull was sickening. As the weapon struck him, Harrigan’s legs seemed to crumple as if they were made of sand. The torch flew in one direction and, John assumed, Harrigan’s own gun went in the other. Instantly, Sherlock snatched up the former item and shone it into John’s eyes, the sallow beam flashing against his own in the process.

“Run,” he said, and set off at a right angle to the hut. With a final backward glance at Harrigan's limp body, John followed.


	9. Chapter 9

Running across the uneven hillside was an alien experience. Firstly, rather than weaving through oncoming traffic and dodging the rubbish bins and advertising boards that littered London’s streets, John found himself worrying about twisting his ankle in a rabbit hole or a stumbling over a stray branch. Secondly, he and Sherlock were habitually the pursuers, rather than the anxious prey. Running away from someone was entirely different from running after them; a pursuit had a defined end, whereas a flight seemed to stretch out unimaginably. The last time John had run away from something was Afghanistan – you could call it retreating if you wanted, but that was often imposing a false order on the situation. He found it impossible to equate the searing, seemingly endless desert days with the damp, heavy darkness of the English countryside.

Most troubling, however, was the fact that John should have been the one lagging behind Sherlock, the one running harder just to keep up with Sherlock’s pace – but he wasn’t. Sherlock was holding the increasingly-weary torch, and so was nominally leading the way. But John could have easily outstripped him if he’d wanted to, and was forced to slow his pace in order to stay alongside his friend. Even at the reduced pace, Sherlock’s footing was unsteady, and he seemed unable to force enough air into his lungs. Each breath seemed shallower and less effective, until John could stand it no longer.

“Stop, Sherlock. Just stop!” he yelled over the noise of the torrential downpour. “We don’t know where we’re going.”

“We need to put more distance between us and him,” Sherlock retorted, in between rough gasps. “We don’t know how well you knocked him out.” John pushed to one side the implied insult and tried again.

“He went down pretty hard. Look, it’s no use just running into the middle of nowhere in the dark.”

“We’ve barely gone half a mile – we need to -” Sherlock’s voice shifted into a strangled cry and at the same instant the touch beam twisted madly and then disappeared completely at the sound of the crack of its plastic shell against something hard. John pulled himself sharply to a halt and crouched down on the ground.

“Sherlock!” he cried, grasping miserably at empty darkness, filled with the sounds of harsh coughing, until he finally made contact with the familiar fabric of Sherlock’s coat, soaked as it was with the rain. John pulled himself closer. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Sherlock could barely catch his breath, but somehow he articulated the reply. John rubbed circles on his back, knowing how fruitless the gesture was, but feeling the compulsion to at least do something. Initially, John felt Sherlock relax back into his touch, but as the fit whimpered to its conclusion, Sherlock shrugged off his hand with bitter vehemence.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Bruised. Some discomfort tomorrow morning must be expected, no doubt exacerbated by the cold and the rain.” He paused and sighed, a dry wheeze that barely seemed strong enough to leave his lips. “But nothing broken, I’m sure. Unlike the torch.”

John sighed and went to look for it without much hope. He encountered the broken remains of its plastic sell a few paces away; it had struck something hard and now lay in at least seven fragments. The torch was a lost cause, and John could not help but voice his frustration.

“Broken?” Sherlock said, hoarsely.

“Completely broken.”

“Must have hit the rock that I slipped on. I felt something hard under my hip as I fell.” John returned to Sherlock’s side. It was only when he was around three feet away that he could even make out Sherlock’s features in the blackness. Suddenly, Sherlock seemed to remember something and his hand shot into the pocket of his coat.

“Shit.” The expletive was unusual and unnerving.

“What is it?”

“My phone. I must have fallen on it. There’s a crack through the screen. It won’t turn on.”

“You were going to call for help?”

“And now you’re going to call for help. Much as it pains me to say this, I’d rather be beholden to Mycroft than die on a wet hillside because of a criminal who isn’t even clever. Besides, Mycroft was the one who sent us here so really it’s the least he can… What is it, John?” Sherlock couldn’t have seen his face in the darkness, so how he knew something was wrong John would never know. But something was wrong. It should have been in that pocket of his jeans. That was where he put it.

“I can’t find my phone,” John said. His voice now sounded almost as fragile as Sherlock’s. “I know I had it at the pub. I know I did.” He waited for Sherlock to swear again, but the expected anger didn’t come.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, as briskly as his wrecked voice would allow. “We’ll just keep going. We’re bound to hit a road soon. This part of the country isn’t quite deserted yet. Someone will come past.”

“Sherlock, we’ve not got a torch. How are we ever going to go ten paces, let alone find a road? Look, I know it’s here -”

“There are dozens of places it could have fallen out of your pocket. Harrigan might even have taken it, although that was probably too logical a thing to have done. We need to get moving again.”

“Your teeth are chattering,” John said, flatly.

“Yes. It’s bloody cold out here.”

“That’s not good.”

“None of this is very good, is it?” Sherlock snapped. John heard a crack, which must have been Sherlock’s broken phone colliding with the rock that put an end to their torch. “We, not unlike our torch before us, seem to be between a rock and a hard place. We go back towards a road we know, but possibly an encounter a homicidal maniac who might have a hand gun and definitely has a shovel. Or we stay out here and possibly die from hypothermia. That’s more your area than mine – thoughts?”

John was silent. On the one hand, they were both dressed pretty well for the weather, but they were also soaked through from the rain which didn’t show any signs of stopping. His watch was invisible in the dark, but considering they’d left the pub at nine, it couldn’t really be much later than eleven now. That was at least seven hours until sun rise. In the darkness, Harrigan might not see them even if he was in a fit state. Unless he was even in the least bit clever and went to wait by the car…

“I’m not entirely sure I can find my way back in the dark,” John admitted. “Are you?”

“No,” Sherlock said tersely.

“We have no idea what the land is like around here, let alone where Harrigan is,” John added. “There might be water, we might be near a ledge…”

“I knew the smoking ban was a bad idea,” Sherlock murmured. John sighed.

“Enlighten me as to how the smoking ban is responsible for us being here now.”

“Oh not that,” Sherlock replied dismissively. “A lack of light and warmth are our problems, and if I still smoked, I’d have a lighter on me now.”

Despite the aching cold that was coiling itself underneath the layers of his clothing and burrowing into his skin, John began to laugh. Sherlock was laughing too; John was close enough to feel the shivers of his shoulders running though his own body. The strain on his lungs, though, was too much and, after only a few seconds, the laughter transformed itself into a horribly familiar deep and rasping cough. John placed his arm around Sherlock, rubbing his back gently once more, and – this time – leaving it there once the spasms subsided.

“We passed a few trees about half a minute before we stopped; they’ll be better shelter than nothing at all. Can you stand up?” John asked, as softly as the noise of the rain would allow. He felt Sherlock nod his head.

“Might need some help,” he mumbled.

“I thought you said you were - ”

“Not the fall. Coughing. The muscles in my chest hurt.” Sherlock made it sound as though admitting this was the most painful thing of all. Silently and carefully, John manoeuvred Sherlock’s arm over his own shoulder, and helped him to his feet. As he did so, his hand brushed against the back of Sherlock’s neck, and he could feel the feverish heat that was radiating from it, despite the chill of the rain. John kept his hand in the small of Sherlock’s back as they gingerly retraced their steps.

The tree must have had branches thick enough to knot together, because the ground underneath them was mercifully dry. John sat Sherlock down propped up against the trunk and then seated himself alongside, close enough so that their upper arms were touching. In the darkness, it seemed safest to have some kind of bodily contact.

“So are you going to start rubbing sticks together?” Sherlock said wryly. His voice was cracked and thin. John managed a weak chuckle.

“You should probably know that I was only in the scouts for six months,” he replied. “I was ten and the idea of camping scared me. Or rather, Harry scared me. She told me that wolves would try to get into my tent. I guess me and the countryside didn’t get off to a good start.”

“Mycroft did something similar to me. I was six and he was thirteen. We went on holiday to the New Forest and he took me for a walk and then pretended that he’d got us lost. He kept it up for an hour. I was nearly hysterical by the time I realised he was leading us back home all along.” Sherlock must have smiled then, because his voice changed its tone as he added, “He was in so much trouble after that episode. Father stopped his subscription to _The Economist_ for three months.”

John swallowed hard and then said, “It’s not Mycroft’s fault we’re here, you know. It’s mine. I asked him to… intervene. With you.” John wished it wasn’t so dark. It would have been helpful to be able to see Sherlock’s face in the silence that followed.

“I know,” Sherlock said finally. “Or rather, I was pretty sure you’d said something. Mycroft worries and interferes from a distance - over the telephone. To turn up at the flat – that kind of legwork required some prompting. He either wanted something, or he’d been invited.”

“He did call me, you know, to ask about you.”

“Yes, that’s very like him.” More expressionless silence.

“Are you angry?” John asked.

“Not really,” Sherlock replied. “But it would be nice for you and Mycroft to admit that your little plan didn’t quite have the desired…” The end of the sentence was lost to more harsh coughs. John could feel Sherlock’s shoulders heaving with the spasms in his lungs, which must be excruciatingly painful if he was having trouble moving. The attack seemed to last an age, and when it finally dissolved, John could still feel Sherlock’s body trembled against his own.

“I need you to tell me honestly how you’re feeling,” John said. Fumbling slightly in the darkness, John placed one hand on Sherlock’s forehead and then two fingers at his throat. John’s own hands were frozen, so it was impossible to gauge Sherlock’s temperature beyond “too hot”, which he clearly was. He skin felt clammy and his pulse was racing. All that sweating and shivering wasn’t conducive to conserving energy.

“Bad,” Sherlock replied, sinking slightly towards John. “Terrible. Breathing… hurts. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing it right. The muscles won’t work together. My lungs feel constricted, somehow. My body feels so heavy, but I’m strangely lightheaded. Giddy almost.”

“That’s the fever,” John said. “I’m sorry there’s not much I can do. My clothes are as wet as yours, they won’t help much. You need to keep talking to me, ok? Because you can’t fall -”

One loud crack rang out through the evening stillness. Then another one. John didn’t need to ask what they were; he’d know the sound of gunshots anywhere, distorted as there were by echoing over the emptiness of the land. Then, there was only silence. No shouts, and that was so much worse.

“Allowing for the downhill slope of the land, they came from about half a mile away,” Sherlock rasped.

“Can you tell what kind of gun it was?” John asked. Sherlock shook his head. “Ok, well. We’re surrounded by farm land. Might be a farmer shooting at a fox. Or a poacher after some game.”

“It might be a murderer with an illegal handgun, wrecking havoc on the local police force’s crime stats. Their violent crime rate will probably have doubled from tonight alone.”

“What do you want to do?” John said.

“Harrigan doesn’t have a torch. He doesn’t know where we went. He’s probably concussed. The chances of him finding us are small,” Sherlock said. “If he does, we’ll hear him coming. We’ll have the advantage.” His teeth were chattering again; it was difficult to force the words out. The noise that they made set the silence on edge whilst they waited.

Suddenly, something in the distance caught John’s eye.

“There’s a light,” he said, pulling Sherlock towards where he could see a flickering dot. “It’s moving, I think.”

“There’s two,” Sherlock added. “Unless this fever means I’m seeing double.”

“No, you’re right.” John could see it clearly now. Two spots of yellow-white light, bobbing up and now and occasionally blurring into one. “Not Harrigan, then,” he said, almost not believing it.

“Or not just Harrigan,” Sherlock said. John wasn’t convinced.

“You know how he works. Would he have had an accomplice? Would he have told someone?” Sherlock’s shoulders tensed like he was struggling with something.

“But do I know?” he said bitterly, voice trembling. “I underestimated him before; I never thought he’d come after me - us. I haven’t been thinking properly. I can’t think. It’s like I’m walking through fog. My head, it - ”

“Yes, you can,” John cut in. “I trust you.” He heard Sherlock swallow in a choked sort of way. The lights were coming closer.

“No,” he said, eventually. “He didn’t have time to plan this carefully. He was alone.” John squeezed Sherlock’s arm and then stood up, moving carefully towards the lights. The rain hit him again, freezing water gushing over his face, stinging in his eyes.

“Hello!” he yelled, as loudly as he could. “Hello! We’re here!”

The lights began to shudder violently, making them seem bigger because they leave hazy traces against the darkness, as whoever was carrying them broke into a run.


	10. Chapter 10

John would like to have known the sort of donation that Mycroft had to make to Gloucestershire Ambulance Service to convince their air ambulance team to take himself and Sherlock not to the large NHS hospital in Cheltenham, but to a small, private clinic that he had been told was near a town called Morton in Marsh. However much it was, John was grateful. Rather than being on a crowded ward, Sherlock was in a private bedroom, so John could sit and alternate between staring out of a large window on to open countryside, and staring at Sherlock, sleeping rather restlessly in the bed.

He almost didn’t notice the phone ringing at first; even after the few days in the cottage, he still wasn’t entirely used to being contacted on a landline. New mobile phones for both of them would have to be a priority, unless the police had found his in the back of Harrigan’s car. The white plastic contraption on Sherlock’s bedside table had to emit several shrill chimes before John reached for the receiver, glancing anxiously at the bed to check that the sound hadn’t woken Sherlock. Sherlock hadn’t opened his eyes, but he pawed at the stark white linen and turned his head sharply away from the sound.

“Hello?” John said in a low voice, stepping away from the bed.

“How are you, John.”

“Mycroft.” Of course. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

“Did you manage to get some rest? I hope the local constabulary weren’t too eager to question you about the events of last night?”

“I haven’t seen them this morning. They’ve been keeping their distance.”

“Oh good. I had to be quite firm, you know. These provincial policemen haven’t been nearly as compliant as their colleagues in the capital.” That’s because your brother’s name isn’t a synonym for “case solved” in these parts, John thought. “The clinic informs me that my brother had a quiet night. I’m unsure if that is good or bad news. It is certainly out of character.”

“It’s exhaustion – and the painkillers,” John said. “They’re flooding him with antibiotics until they can x-ray his chest, and giving him two antipyretics to keep his temperature down. He’s sleeping now; that’s the best thing for him.”

“I’m glad to hear you agree with their choice of treatment. I had limited time to research the facility.”

“They told us last night that Harrigan was alive,” John said, bluntly changing the subject.

“I have had the same information,” Mycroft replied. “He’s currently in a police cell whilst they decide exactly what to charge him with.”

“There were gunshots.”

“From his gun, but he didn’t fire them,” Mycroft said. “One of the officers managed to stumble over the firearms and it went off. Not a particular reliable weapon it seems - but nevertheless quite real.”

“And did they find…”

“It was very strange that the scene of crime officer typed two guns instead of one into his report; such an odd mistake to make. It has, of course, been corrected.” John expected that he would find his gun on the table in Baker Street when they returned, no doubt having had some minor repairs along the way.

“How did you know that something had gone wrong?” John asked.

“You’re a creature of habit, John. Harrigan left the sat nav in the car. You never did that, regardless of how much I recommended to you that you do so. I tried the telephone, and when I got no reply, I decided it was time to set someone looking for a helicopter I could requisition.”

“I’m grateful,” John told him. “And Sherlock is too, even if he won’t say it.”

“You might be less grateful when they break it to Sherlock that the doctors are planning to keep him there another two days at least,” Mycroft said. John silently agreed. There was, however, something else that he wanted to ask.

“Mycroft, when you and Sherlock were children, did you really pretend to get the two of you lost in the New Forest?” Silence met him at the other end of the line.

“Sherlock was a very sensitive child,” Mycroft said eventually. “I shouldn’t have been held responsible for his inability to keep events in perspective.” There was a click and the line went dead. John replaced the receiver and noticed that Sherlock’s eyes were open and staring at him from behind a mess of tangled dark curls.

“He’ll never admit to it,” Sherlock said. His voice was barely audible, croaking out from between chapped lips. “Are you all right?” John moved towards the bedside table and poured out a glass of water.

“Yeah. I was bit cold, quite damp and completely exhausted – but nothing a good night’s sleep didn’t fix. You on the other hand…” John paused with the half-full glass in his hand. “Can you manage this?” Sherlock lifted a rather unsteady hand and, ruefully, shook his head. Perching on the edge of the bed, John carefully lifted the glass to Sherlock’s lips and allowed him to sip slowly.

“What’s my diagnosis, then?”

“Judging by what they’re giving you, I’d say they’re concerned about the possibility of pneumonia and pleurisy. No escaping that chest x-ray now. And you weren’t quite hypothermic when you came in, but it was pretty close. They want to keep you here another two days, at least.” Sherlock sighed, and grimaced at the shooting pain in his chest. “I can get them to give you something stronger for that,” John added.

Sherlock shook his head, then added, “Two days?”

“At least two days. It'll be longer if you actually have pneumonia.”

“You told me we’d only be out of London for a week,” Sherlock rasped.

“You told me Harrigan wasn’t dangerous,” John countered. “We’ll go back to London as soon as possible. It’s not as though I actually want to stay here. This has been the least successful holiday ever.”

“Not quite. Better than the New Forest. Better company, anyway,” Sherlock said, with a slight smile. He coughed, curling in on himself, drawing his knees towards his chest. John rubbed his shoulder gently; somehow, in the confines of a warm hospital room, the sound wasn’t so bad.

“Well, maybe we can plan another one once we’re back in London. And once you get through the backlog of cases that Lestrade will have accumulated during your convalescence. Somewhere warm, that doesn’t have any suspected murderers.”

“That’s impossible,” Sherlock mused. “Maybe we could settle on somewhere closer to home. A night at the Ritz? I’m sure Mycroft could run to it.”

“Sounds good to me,” John replied. Glancing out of the window, he saw that the sun was coming out.


End file.
